while collecting stars, i connected the dots
by a vegetable
Summary: Most of all, however, you remembered another little boy, sat aside from all the rigid steel and iron in their sharp geometric angles and their edges propped against each other to keep everything from falling apart at the seams. Perched on a countertop with his ankles crossed, spinning a pencil between grease blackened fingertips. [Discontinued.Feel free to read what's already here]


_A/N: This is incredibly under thought and I got bored of writing it half way through and left it at a random point in the story. I am not going to continue it so please don't ask. Lmao, I have two DaveKat fics and a Rosemary fic I'm supposed to be writing but all I can do is chug out more DirkJake. Title is from Jupiter by Sleeping At Last._

Simple instructions you were given. Standing tall and regal looking as she as she always did your Grandmother had looked up with an oil stained face and burns on her gloves from the spot-welder. She'd blinked, old and owl-like through Coke-bottle glasses, and said like she'd only just remembered.

"Washers, Jakey, that's what I need. Be a love and get some for me from the mechanics store in town."

Cluelessly, you'd stumbled into town with a sticky-note map scrawled in bright green biro. You returned with her washers, and she'd grinned, placed a kiss on your forehead and returned to her work. She worked as she lived, with vigour and laughter and an awful lot of dangerous chemicals strewn about the table.

The vision of the shop stayed in your mind, clear as the water in your bottle when you tip it back slightly and let the sunlight fall through the plastic. Walking in was like coming across a gargantuan wall of metal. Racks of spanners like a metallic battalion, nuts and bolts stacked like the fishing baskets at the beach, motor oil and lubricant in uniform rows with monotone labels and descriptors written in every language but English. It was a very big, very bright place for an eight year old with instructions from his Grandmother to go and collect some little pieces of metal.

Most of all, however, you remembered another little boy, sat aside from all the rigid steel and iron in their sharp geometric angles and their edges propped against each other to keep everything from falling apart at the seams. Perched on a countertop with his ankles crossed, spinning a pencil between grease blackened fingertips. He was perhaps a little older than you, and he entranced you, because what else does a little boy think of other than "someone to play with" when he sees another lad his age.

Your Grandmother doesn't ask you down to the mechanics shop again, because she remembers to buy things for herself, and takes pills for her sleeping problem so she doesn't nod off when she goes shopping.

Nevertheless, clear thoughts like your water are never clearer than they are when you remember a little boy who twirls his pencil like a parade leader's baton on his countertop seat.

You help your Grandmother clean the car during the summer, and with the money she gives you ("For being such a helpful little boy."), you buy yourself a field-guide on wild plants and animals, and a magnifying glass, and a notepad and green pencils. You hurtle down to the park with all of your new equipment held close to your chest and settle yourself amongst the wildflowers near the fence where you can write down what you find, and draw out their petals and leaves.

You start when you notice two other children at the park, because you thought you were alone, but the girl and boy who sit on the swings and idly chat to each other don't seem bothered by whatever you're doing, so you keep to yourself, and carry on writing about the plants you find.

The first page of your notepad has notes on bluebells and Oxeye daisies and cowlicks and you smile at your handiwork, as well as your little sketches of flowers in forest green pencil.

You're about to continue onto the next page when a voice behind you says,

"What're you doin'?"

You turn around to the girl from the swings crouched on her heels and scrunching her nose at the notepad in your hands. She has brown skin like yours, and a floppy white hat and curly blonde hair. A boy stands behind her, perhaps a little older, and one look at the oil smudges on his arms like charcoal tells you that this is the boy from the mechanics shop. He has freckles like a blizzard over his cheeks and messy blonde hair that falls in front of his eyes. He's a lot paler than you, but he's red with sunburn and Band-Aids cover his shins like patches on a punctured tyre.

"I'm drawing flowers." You tell the girl, and she sits next to you and stares at your notepad. "I have a book that tells me all about them and I'm using it to find out more about the ones in this park."

"Can I draw with you?" she asks. You nod and rip out a page in your notebook for her to use, you give her a pencil and she begins scribbling on the page with her tongue stuck out in concentration. She draws a cat in a pointy hat and shows you. You tell her it's good and she says your drawings are good too.

"My name's Jake English." You tell her as she flips onto the back of her page and begins to draw a wizard.

"I'm Roxy!" she says with a grin, one of her teeth is missing. She points at the boy who still stands behind her, unmoving and almost statue like until he frowns at the finger pointed his way. "And that's Dirk. He's my cousin. He doesn't talk much."

"Not to strangers." The boy mutters, and his voice is soft when he talks.

A lady sitting at the park bench reading slips her book into her bag and wanders over to you. She kneels down beside Roxy and Dirk and smiles.

"It's time to go now dear. Why don't you and Dirk go and collect your stuff and we'll get you back to Uncle Dave's." the lady stands back up again, and she retreats towards the park gate with a cat like stride.

"Okay mom!" Roxy says and turns to you, "Bye Jake. It was fun drawin' with you."

"You too." You nod Roxy's way and she runs over to the swings, where she snatches a bottle of sun cream and a picture book from the tarmacked ground. Dirk follows, and picks up what appears to be a large, floppy puppet.

The two of them disappear into the backseat of the lady's car, and you're left alone again to doodle in your notebook.

Except this time it's better, because you know the name of the boy from the mechanics shop.

A few days after your tenth birthday Grandma pulls you into town with fuzzy gloved hands and a nose dripping with cold towards a shop with lots of cardboard boxes outside of it. It's December and the winds are beginning to threaten snow. Grandma has you all bundled up in a new scarf and coat that she bought you for your birthday, and you can barely move for all the wool and zips holding you in place.

The shop is the mechanics store, you notice, as you look at the old sign above the door, the paint now stripping off in dry red flakes. Your Grandmother leans on a cardboard box and smiles at a man as he leaves the shop,

"Ahoy there, Strider!"

The man turns around with an eyebrow raised above shiny sunglasses and he smiles around his grip on an unlit cigarette between his teeth.

"Shutting up shop, I see?" Grandma says, as the man sits on a badly taped up cardboard box.

"Finally got a deal on one of my scripts. No more small time mechanics shop for me, Jade, the Strider family's goin' big." The man takes the cigarette out of his mouth and holds it in his hands like it's something special. He stares at it through his sunglasses. "I'm almost sad to see the old place go."

"You were always meant for big things, Dave, I could tell." Grandma smiles at the shop, squinting at the windows washed over with swirly white paint, "You don't need the shop anymore but…I think it will always hold a place somewhere in our hearts."

"Of course you'd say that. You get all sentimental with stuff like this. Y'know, Harley, you're awfully soft for someone who claims to be a bear fu-" he pauses, looking at you for a split second. "Hugger. For someone who claims to be a bear hugger."

You don't listen to the rest of their conversation, not when they talk nonstop for almost twenty minutes. You almost nod off, but Grandma nudges you awake and says,

"Come on now dear, we need to go get some milk from the store."

You walk with her, compliant as usual, but you spare a moment to glance over your shoulder and see a boy, perhaps a little older than you, with messy blonde hair, helping to get a box into the back of a car.

"Jeez, Dirk, c'mon it's not _that_ heavy."

"Shut up, Dave."

After Easter, Grandma gets ill, and she starts going to hospital every week for check-ups and medication. You don't like going to the hospital with her, because it smells like antiseptic and odd soap, and you have to clean your hands in every room you go into. Grandma is always tired, and she doesn't walk like she used to. You have to slow down so you don't wander off without her.

There are lots of old people in the hospital, and they lie in bed with tubes in their skin attached to pouches of fluid, and they have to be taken care of by the nurses and doctors who work at the hospital. You don't like looking at them because Grandma is old, and you don't want Grandma to be like them.

You tell her this when you get home late one night, and you're supposed to be in bed for school the next day but instead she picks you up and holds you tight against her chest and whispers and coos in your ear about how she's going to be alright.

"I'm not going to end up sick like them dear. I have a different type of illness to them. They need to stay in hospital because they can't take care of themselves. I can take care of myself, and I can take care of you too, see?"

On the 23rd of May, you're driven to a cemetery in a big black car, and you watch a mahogany coffin be lowered into the ground whilst holding onto your Great-Uncle John's hand. You cry a lot, because Grandma told you she would be okay, and that she would take care of you, but if that were true you wouldn't be here wiping the condensation off of your glasses and dropping them when you try to put them back on. Uncle John picks them up for you, but they cracked from the drop and when you put them on it hurts your eyes, so he picks you up and you nestle against his chest until you fall asleep and the rain cries for you instead.

You live with your Great-Uncle John and your cousin Jane and her father after that, because they have a big house and lots of room for you, and, according to Uncle John, Grandma wanted you to stay with them.

It's hard at first, because when you smell bacon in the morning you run downstairs expecting to see Grandma hunched over the hob with a frying pan and a spatula, but instead you see Jane's dad as he struggles with his tie before going to work early in the morning. You go out on adventures in the forest near the house but it's not the same without your Grandma to come and get you in the evenings when you need to come home, and then calls out, "Jakey, my dear, it's the big brave explorer's bedtime!"

Jane bakes you cupcakes whenever you look sad, and they taste spectacular, but they're always perfect, and not burnt like Grandma's would be because she forgot to set a timer and had to run to the kitchen whilst smoke billowed out as if a dragon was lying beneath the stove.

When you turn eleven, it's your first birthday without Grandma, and you cry like it was still her funeral day, and you were still squinting through old glasses with a crack that steamed up when you cried.

Joining secondary school is what the teachers at your school called "a big new adventure" but this wasn't like your adventures. Secondary school wasn't like climbing trees or crawling through bushes or building dens out of leaves and branches or following the river to see what you could find. Secondary school was a huge block of concrete, with none of the brightly coloured hopscotch painted on the yard floor and no assemblies where you had to sing the song's that were projected on the wall of the dinner hall. All of the kids are bigger than you, even Jane has you by an inch or so now, and walking into a teenager who's bigger and stronger than you is the scariest thing you can imagine.

You don't have any classes with Jane, and everyone from your primary school went elsewhere for secondary.

You feel possibly more alone than ever before.

One day, when Jane has flu and has to stay at home, you walk to the bus-stop alone in the rain. It's grey like the old pictures Uncle John has pinned to the kitchen notice-board, and the sky rumbles like there's a great hoard of beasts roaming the clouds. You forgot your coat this morning. You're almost soaked through.

There's another boy at the bus-stop, you know he's in the year above you because you've seen him walking into Year 8 assemblies on Thursday morning. You also know that the oil stains and welder burns on his hands and clothes aren't coincidence, and this is definitely the boy from the mechanics shop, but now that you're a Year 7, and he's a Year 8 (and for some reason the fact that you're eleven and he's twelve is disconcerting) you know that he'd never even think about becoming friends with you.

You don't why for so long you've been dreaming about becoming friends with a boy you caught a fleeting glance of in a shop one day, three years ago.

You also know, that because this is the boy from the mechanics shop and because he sits with a girl with brown skin and curly blonde hair at lunch, that his name is Dirk.

Dirk Something-or-other.

You know Grandma mentioned a name once, because she was friends with Dirk's…dad? Brother? It was hard to tell, the relationship was never made clear, but the name eludes you nevertheless.

Dirk is wearing a coat, and as he bobs his head slowly to whatever he's listening to through headphones on his battered old iPod, he notices you, shivering and soaking and barely still moving in the corner of the bus-stop. Coatless.

You're not sure why he has such a moment of sympathy, but within seconds he's saying softly,

"Hey, you look cold." And wrapping the still-warm trench-coat around you. "I don't need it, you do, obviously."

"Thank you…" you mutter, looking at him with that way that your Grandmother used to say was, _so harrowing Jakey. Like you're asking something of someone with such desperation. I wish I knew what was going on in your head when you gave me that look._

And Dirk gave you the same look back.

You return to the bus-stop the next day, Jane still bed-ridden and missing from you side, and it's not raining now.

Bundled up as though it held a baby, you carried the trench-coat in your arms. Like it's something special, something important that you want to hold close to you. It is. And you know that. You hope Dirk will know that too.

"Thanks for letting me borrow it yesterday; I dare say it stopped me from catching my death in this weather." You hand it back to him gently, and he takes it with less care, but more familiarity.

"No problem, man. You looked like you needed it."

You stretch out a hand like it's your first time meeting him (definitely not the fifth, because you haven't been counting, and you only talked to him in two and now three of those five times.)

"I'm Jake, by the way. Jake English."

Dirk looks at your hand rather than shakes it and then looks back up.

"I know."

"I thought you might."

You meet him again, every morning when you amble to the bus-stop with sleep weary feet like lead, and a half-awake brain that buzzes like a computer left to overheat. He's always there, and you always spend fifteen minutes talking, or fifteen minutes silently enjoying each other's company until the bus arrives.

When Jane is well enough to come back to school a week and a half later, she sits to your left and Dirk is on your right. She doesn't ask when or how you came into his company, or how you are so familiar with someone you only had glimmers of during school hours. Somehow, she seems to understand, and you're grateful for that, because Jane has a way of being sceptical at times.

You move up a year, and grow an inch, and now you're as tall as Jane, but Dirk is edging on six feet, and dwarves both of you. You begin to join him at breaks and lunchtimes, instead of just chatting at the bus-stop.

You loiter in the library, plucking books from shelves and reading three pages before putting them back because books are so _samey_ nowadays. Dirk complains about lack of diversity and minority representation amongst YA novels, and you agree. He chews his way through books as he does the cereal bars that he somehow manages to sneak into the library despite the strict rules against eating inside.

"They taste like someone dipped dust in fruit syrup." He holds a half-eaten cereal bar between forefinger and thumb, scrutinizing it with careful eyes, "But they're a slow energy release and you can eat them fairly quickly, so that's good enough for me."

It's already half way through your second year at secondary school when Dirk finds you waiting in the library, nose in a Charles Dickens novel, and invites you over to his house for the weekend. A grin battles ferociously with the composure of your teeth and lips, but what is composure compared to outright happiness. You smile and say that you'll be there for definite.

Two days later you're sitting in his room, on his bed, one of his blankets draped over your knees and working your thumbs like crazy over the keypad of games controller. Bowser and Luigi brawl on screen as you smash at the keys blindly and Dirk carefully places his fingers like using a controller is the most delicate thing he could do. You despair later on after finding out that Dirk has not lost a Smash Bros game once in his life, and you believe him as Bowser victories time after time on screen.

"Should have played as Kirby." He half chuckles through the pillow that you threw at him.

You order pizza at seven, because Dave ("My brother." Dirk tells you, but there's strain on the word brother, and from what you remember of Dave who used to own the mechanics store, the age gap seemed far too large for a fraternal relationship.) is away on important work business.

"He's a movie director. Or at least, he will be when his first film comes out." Dirk explains around a mouthful of cheese and peperoni. "They're taking an awful long time on a piece of trash that's supposed to be purposefully awful."

You're supposed to walk to the bus-stop at eight for Uncle John to collect you, but the creaking of his rickety old Sedan and the smell of bad exhaust fumes it not a welcoming thought, and right before you're supposed to leave Dirk says,

"Hey, do you want to see my workshop? I basically just draw designs and mess around with metal and welders in there but it's pretty cool."

How can you say no?

You first saw Dirk in a mechanics shop, sitting on a countertop and spinning a pencil in his hands, and as you take in the beautiful mess that lies within his workshop he leans against the door-frame, pencil in hand, ready to twirl it as if he was still there, four years ago.

Everything fascinates you, from the angular edges of ripped metal to the diagonal lines of designs scrawled on blue paper. Nuts, bolts, _washers_ cover every surface, and you believe the black marks on the right most corner are from some sort of explosion, but you don't mention those.

If maths, science and everything you've ever assumed about engineers were to be placed in a room, Dirk's workshop would be that room. Dare you say that you've never seen anything quite this amazing.

Yes, you remember you were supposed to go home, but you stay. You stay until geometric shapes outlined in frantic liquor orange are burnt into the back of your eyelids.

You don't remember falling asleep, but you wake up in Dirk's bed, dressed in a pair of Dirk's pyjamas and incredibly comfortable. A note is stuck to the bedside table where your glasses also reside.

 _You fell asleep so I called your Uncle and told him that you'd be staying over for the night. Sleep well, English._


End file.
